Blizzard: No WoW For Consoles, "Square Peg In A Round Hole"

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Ever since World of Warcraft released back in 2005, console gamers everywhere have been wondering if Blizzard would ever deliver the addictive MMO to their favorite home entertainment system. The clamor rose when the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 arrived, but Blizzard has recently clarified - again - that the chances of WoW coming to either console are very slim.

According to Videogamer, this has nothing to do with a Valve-like bias; Blizzard "has nothing against consoles," and the concept of WoW on a console is just a "square peg round hole thing." As most of you are well aware, the MMO on PC consists of a whole lot of pointing and clicking; something you really can't do with a gamepad, regardless of how powerful the hardware is. Furthermore, this news falls in line with what Blizzard executive vice-president of product development and co-founder Frank Pearce said about Starcraft 2. He basically said the chances of it coming to consoles were "very close to zero." Lastly, when production director of Wrath of the Lich King, J. Allen Brack, spoke at Leipzig last week, it was more of the same:

"World of Warcraft is designed as a PC game. It's designed to have a keyboard and a mouse. So the controls and the control scheme that you have are very PC centric. If you think about mapping those controls and all those different type of buttons that you have to a console without a keyboard for chatting, it's a very challenging proposition.

It's really not that we have anything against consoles. I mean we love console games also. And I'm sure there will be a successful MMO sometime on a console. So it has nothing to do with that. It's just more like a square peg round hole thing for our game. It just wasn't designed with that in mind."

We'll buy some of that, although we're fairly certain there have been successful MMOs on consoles already, although probably not to the success level exhibited by WoW. Furthermore, with Sony Online Entertainment preparing all sorts of online MMOs like The Agency, M.A.G., FreeRealms, and more, it's just another genre the PC no longer has a stranglehold on. But as for Blizzard's stuff coming to PS3 or 360? Yeah, not likely. Sorry.

8/27/2008 Ben Dutka

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